Daphne's Ghost

She had met a ghost once. Back when fireworks had split the sky open and rained stars down, but what a vacuous length of time has unspooled since then.

She is a stoic; a rootless thing, with a first name and some memories that she carries on her back like heavy, sleeping children and that is all she dares know.

It will be a beautiful, clean night, for the sky has a brilliancy about the edges. Dusk rustles in the graveyard but she isn’t afraid. Daphne had been brought squalling into the world in darkness and in those first breaths her eyes had grown luminous as a cat’s. Or so her family used to say, her mother smirking in her chair, all brittle words and heart of muscle.

In her life Daphne has only met one ghost.

The prospect of fireworks had made the city writhe with excitement. Daphne had heard conversations loop over and over until she'd fled to the sea, its heavy bass smoothing her panic away; a wordless song singing her up the dune to where a patchy forest grew and along to a small graveyard. Silent until she'd turned, stiff, toward the sound of breathing.

It was a human man with dark hair and a body hunched like a frightened rabbit. Her instincts screamed a warning, for something about him was utterly, terrifyingly wrong. Before he could straighten up she’d attacked. His eyes hit her and with a yank of bewildered space she found herself standing, holding nothing.

‘What was that for?’ He cried indignantly, speaking with the twang of a fisherman's boy.

His eyes were enormous, so pale it was as if they emitted their own lunar glow, so unearthly that the hairs on her arms crackled. He was light and shadow, an indeterminable thing. Yet he was soft and human and her fingernails should have found their mark but they did not.

Her second attack left her reeling, tumbled on the ground in an undignified heap of bones. ‘Stop that!’ he shouted. His voice was curiously disembodied, a rough, mighty voice for such a nacreous creature. She watched as he sat himself on the bench, gazing distractedly to where the land cut away to the sea.

‘What are you?’ she whispered.

‘Are you trying to kill me?’ He said, smiling mirthlessly. He was a strange one, him.

‘Yes.’

‘You can't.’

She tossed her hair and demanded, ‘Why not?’ An owl called and he looked into the trees anxiously. Daphne noted the tremor in his nervous hands; the yellowish age marks on his expensive shirt. He smelt of fear and of rank, old earth, which didn't match the bluish pellucidity of his skin. She studied him until her eyes hurt but she couldn't, she couldn't reconcile his human body with his inextinguishable otherness. ‘Why not?’ she snarled again.

He looked at her squarely for the first time.

‘Because…’ He said. ‘Because I’m already dead, aren’t I?’

On his gravestone was carved his full name but she had only ever called him Fin. In life his father had obliged him to pick up the familial lobster pots as was tradition and then his path had taken a hairpin turn and left him dead at twenty-four.

Her suspicion took time to settle but he talked to her regardless, telling her such things. Ghosts could only touch or be touched if they chose it, he told her; some quirk of the mind that solidified Fin’s flesh under her fingertips. It took a steep degree of concentration, he added. In time it became easier for him and in this state his skin was like fish scales, silky and cool. Daphne had never encountered such kindness as she did in Fin.

Every day she slept late, waking hungry as the devil, hunted through the bins for food and trapped animals in the forest like her ancestors had and every night her feet led her back to Fin’s grave. The sea drew in and out; time turned. Daphne grew so attached to Fin that it was like a bruise on her ribcage.

Yet she was still her mother’s demon child with the eyes like a cat’s. When her fury surged he would remind her bluntly that try as she might she could never hurt him.

The first time he’d said this it had triggered a madness in Daphne. They’d found an injured fox in the brush, its ears flattened, mouth a bright snarl and had argued over what to do with it. The more he advocated for its life the more her hunter instincts riled. When she threatened him his patience wore thin and he mocked the impotence of her threat until she snapped.

While he stared in disbelief she threw handfuls of earth, popped slugs and cracked the brittle shells of snails. She was panting and she looked at the fox, its terror a smell that filled her mouth. It tried to run and stumbled, its paw rent in rags from a trap. Daphne dragged the fox out of its cover and broke its neck.

It was done so fast that Fin had no time to stop her but his body rammed into her nonetheless. With her clamped in his arms he shook her like a doll. How dared she destroy life so thoughtlessly? His grief painted the kindness in his face in vivid hues. He shocked her into repentance because his passion was unexpected. It frightened her.

‘Life is precious.’ He told her. If he'd been able to he would have wept. ‘I was alive once. Now that I’m dead I can't even be dead properly! And you – you have no idea how it feels to die.’ She nodded. She didn't. She stroked his face and kissed his forehead like a mother but that didn't feel right so she kissed his mouth.

Fin looked at her until his lunar eyes blinded her and then he shrank away and began to bury the fox. For a minute or two all Daphne could see was moon, sharp as life, and then she rose and pushed him from the meagre grave.

She set to heaving earth out of the ground.

The fox's body was still soft; its blank eyes bored holes in her. She looked at Fin. He smelt sad; a pining smell of old things. She laid the fox down and covered it up without a word.

When she looked up from her work Fin had gone.

She was built to endure but after two weeks his terrible absence took its toll and she crammed the air with words, calling him back. Daphne sensed the indigo vibration of his quiet breathing and shot to his side. He promised, then, to never leave her again.

Daphne had been given a heritage of violence. She tried to explain this to Fin, so that he would forgive her. By now it was late summer. The apple tree was fat with growing fruit.

He looked towards the sea and held her hand.

‘Just promise me,’ he said sombrely. ‘That you won't needlessly kill?’

Daphne didn't know what to say so she just said, ‘I promise.’ She drew patterns on his skin with her nails, and something struggled and fluttered inside the walls of her body. She turned his face towards hers. ‘I promise, I promise, I promise.’ She kept repeating until he covered her mouth in a kiss, cool at first, hesitant. Then he pulled lengths of her hair through his pale hands and he grew warm.

Under the starved moon he drew her down and she was drowning in the taste of him - like mineral, a cold, woozy taste.

Fin told her more stories about his life and Daphne told him about the city, the throbbing, choking modern world that he lived above. He narrowed his eyes in alarm.

‘I’m glad I can’t leave the graveyard then. My father always said human beings would devour the world and then each other.’

Daphne cocked her head. ‘Of course you can leave the graveyard!’

‘No, I can’t.’ He looked away.

‘Have you ever tried? Why are so afraid of the world? Why are you so afraid of the sun?’

He looked distressed. ‘What if I melt away? I don’t know what happens. I was always told you lived, died and God sent you to heaven or hell. There’s no rules now and it scares me.’

Daphne stood and reached for him.

‘Well I don’t believe in God.’ She declared. ‘And there’s no need to be scared because I’ll be with you.’

He paused at the border of the graveyard but she knew he would yield to her touch as she pulled him through. She led him through the trees, along the track that the summer rains had softened. His eyes shone with wonder. The branches dripped, the world was a damp, warm nutshell and Fin would crack it open.

They came to the beach and Daphne shivered with delight, taking in the heavy, wily sea, shining like silver. The sea was like a mother, as vicious as her own had been only it would never leave. It had wrapped its arms around her when her real mother had told her she was too weak to be her daughter. Her real mother had slipped her hand around Daphne’s lover and kissed his lips. They had laughed and they had left, leaving Daphne bloodied in the mud.

She clenched Fin's fingers and she felt dizzy. He looked out in wonderment.

‘How will I breathe?’ he murmured.

‘You don't breathe, you're dead.’ She said and she started laughing. She grabbed his hand and ran. Daphne watched Fin’s face as the rage of the sea hit him, pooled around him and submerged him. She could feel the electricity of his freedom and she cast air into her lungs and let the water drag her down.

Time unravelled into elasticity. Daphne allowed the deep cold, that dark wet satin, to envelop her and she felt Fin’s hands on her, his mouth and fingernails. A flash of silver as a fish flickered past. When Daphne needed air they rose up, clothes unspooling around them and then pulling in slick. Daphne took a great lungful of air and they walked out onto the sand.

Fin stood a little apart from Daphne, with his hands on his knees as if tired, though this could not be. When he looked at her his eyes said a thousand things, things he could not say aloud. Her joy faded, burnt out in an instant.

‘Fin?’ He closed his eyes, shuttering her moonlight. Things blurred sharply and then she drew herself up as tall as she could and she reached for him. ‘Fin, you must stay with me.’ she demanded, banishing the gentleness out of her but as he opened his eyes again the blaze of her turmoil grew suddenly very quiet.

‘I think I have to go.’ Fin said. Daphne nodded. The hollow booming of the ocean filled out the edges of her head. ‘I'm sorry.’ he murmured and he crouched down because his dimming body was shaking.

She streaked to his side. Fin stroked her face, her cold, black grief marbling her features into a statue from which it seemed no light could pass. He roped her hair around his hands as if that way he could stay. She would have believed this desire but for the truth she'd seen; the relief and joy and the guilt intermingled with his grief as he felt his body fading.

He was barely there now but she could still feel his fingertips on her cheek. He buried his head in her neck and kissed the skin there. Long after he was gone she was still speaking senseless things to him and then it struck her in a swoop of empty air and she pawed the sand helplessly, keening like a wolf while the sliver of moon shivered like a blinkered version of Fin's eyes.

*

What a place this is. She hates every diseased tree, fungi-ridden, crawling with ants and decay. She hates the grass around Fin's grave, which refuses not to grow. She stays away from the ocean itself, although plenty of times she's stood above it on the cliff and watched the oily waves murmur and laugh at her. But no – she cannot blame the sea.

Under her skin her heart still beats like a cold clock. What a hideous sound, reducing everything until all she can hear is her own life thudding in her ears. Daphne can remember him in the superficial details of his eyes, his smell, his weight but the subtleties are more difficult. That sound of her heartbeat is so distracting. She leans towards Fin’s gravestone, fumbles aside the weeds and lays her cheek against the rain-smoothed stone. She kisses his name farewell and gets up.

She has become so heavy and old.

She walks to the cliff and watches the ocean groaning against the rock. Daphne feels calmer with the boom of the surf drowning out her pulse. She considers the sea and slowly puts one foot over the edge, dangling it.

Here there is a wind; it whips her filthy hair back. Daphne turns her wrists in circles, relishing the chill, salty air and something eases inside her. She puts her foot back down.

Why this night, why this dewdrop of time she does not know but a smile traces her lips, a ghost of her past joy. As she walks back into the trees she thinks about him, gorging on the memory as she follows the track down, over the dune to the water’s edge. The waves are gentle, slipping around Daphne's feet. Her dress grows heavier around the frayed seams as she goes deeper and deeper in.

Her head slips under the water, while the moon hangs high like a ghostly eye.